integrate different elements from one's edu-
cation and experience and bring them to
bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet
we were struck by how little attention most
departments and programs have given to
cultivating this essential capacity. We were
also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to
discover how infrequently some of our stu-
dents exercise it. For all their extraordinary
energy and range, many of the students we
encountered lead curiously compartmental-
ized lives, with little integration between the
different spheres of their experience.
T ike any president of a large univer-
L sity, John Hennessy is subject to a
relentless schedule of breakfasts, meet-
ings, lunches, speeches, ceremonies,
handshakes, dinners, and late-night
calls alerting him to an injury or a fatal-
ity on campus. His home becomes a
public space for meetings and entertain-
ing. He juggles various constituencies-
faculty, administrators, students, alumni,
trustees, athletics. The routine becomes
a daily blur, compelling a president to
want to break away and seek a larger
vision, something that becomes his
stamp, his legacy. For a while, it seemed
that StanfordNYC might provide that
legacy.
Hennessy declared that aNew York
campus was "a landmark decision." He
invested enormous time and effort to
overcome faculty, alumni, trustee, and
student unease about diverting campus
resources for such a grandiose project. "I
was originally a skeptic," Otis Reid, a se-
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nior economics major, says. But Hen-
nessy persuaded him, by arguing that
Stanford's future will be one of expan-
sion, and Reid agreed that N ew York
was a better place to go first than Abu
Dhabi.
On December 16, 2011, Stanford
announced that it was withdrawing its
bid. Publicly, the university was vague
about the decision, and, in a statement,
Hennessy praised "the mayor's bold vi-
sion." But he was seething. In January,
he told me that the city had changed the
terms of the proposed deal. After seven
universities had submitted their bids, he
said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford
to agree that the campus would be oper-
ational, with a full complement of fac-
ulty, sooner than Stanford thought was
feasible. The city, according to Debra
Zumwalt, Stanford's general counsel
and lead negotiator, added "many mil-
lions of dollars in penalties that were not
in the original proposal, including pe-
nalizing Stanford for failure to obtain
approvals on a certain schedule, even if
the delays were the fault of the city and
not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for
over thirty years, and I have never seen
negotiations that were handled so poorly
by a reputable party." One demand that
particularly infuriated Stanford was a
fine of twenty million dollars if the City
Council, not Stanford, delayed approval
of the project. These demands came
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'1 see it, but it scampers away/rom the light."
from city lawyers, not from the Mayor
or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel,
who did not participate in the final
round of negotiations with Stanford
officials. However, city negotiators were
undoubtedly aware that Mayor Bloom-
berg, in a speech at M.I.T., in Novem-
ber, had said of two of the applicants,
"Stanford is desperate to do it. Cornell is
desperate to do it. . . . We can go back
and try to renegotiate with each" univer-
sity. Out of the blue, Hennessy says, the
city introduced the new demands.
To Hennessy, these demands illus-
trated a shocking difference between the
cultures of Silicon Valley and of the city.
"I've cut billion -dollar deals in the Valley
with a handshake," Hennessy says. "It
was a very different approach"-and, he
says, the city was acting "not exactly like
"
a partner.
Yet the decision seemed hasty. Why
would Hennessy, who had made such an
effort to persuade the university commu-
nity to embrace StanfordNYC, not pause
to call a business-friendly mayor to try to
get the city to roll back what he saw as its
new demands? Hennessy says that his
sense of trust was fundamentally shaken.
City officials say they were surprised by
the sudden pullout, especially since Hen-
nessy had an agreeable conversation with
Deputy Mayor Steel earlier that same
week.
Steel insists that "the goalposts were
fixed." All the stipulations that Stanford
now complains about, he says, were part
of the city's original package. Actually,
they weren't. In the city's proposal re-
quest, the due dates and penalties were
left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of
the New York City Economic Develop-
ment Corporation, who was one of the
city's lead negotiators, says that these
were to be filled in by each bidder and
then discussed in negotiations. "The
more aggressive they were on the sched-
ule and the more aggressive they were on
the amount, the more favorably' the city
looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the
negotiations, he said, he tried to get each
bidder to boost its offer by alerting it of
more favorable competing bids. At one
point, Stanford asked about an ambigu-
ous clause in the city's proposal request:
would the university have to indemnify
the city if it were sued for, say, polluted
water on Roosevelt Island? The city
responded that the university would.